Standard Member

My 37 inch sharp aquos left me with a feeling of 'meh', after a disappointing general picture quality, mainly due to pixelation/blockiness.

Last night I decided to have a go at plugging my laptop in via VGA, and WOW. Even playing a DIVX, the picture was stunning. Is this my only option to get a good picture on this screen?

I'm using an NTL box, and a budget DVD player without prog. scan, which I assume is contributing towards the 'bad' picture we're seeing. Would progressive scan significantly improve our DVDs, and would daisy chaining hte NTL box into a DVD recorder with progressive scan, then displaying the output into the LCD screen improve our cable tv picture?

Banned

I don't know about the DVD recorder option, but I don't think that would be a huge help. A better bet would be to look into a dedicated video processor. I'm no expert on those, but I get the feeling most of them are made for the US market so you'd have to connect over S-Video and not SCART.

As for Progressive Scan DVD, yes, it is definitely worth it. At the moment, all content, whether Film or Video type, will be being passed through the TV set's deinterlacer. This is wasting resolution - buying a model with Progressive Scan will improve the picture so is definitely worth it.

Well-known Member

Miniboot, you could try buying a stand-alone video scaler/deinterlacer, but that wouldn't be cheap (several hundred pounds). There's a whole separate forum on here for discussing such devices. But you might find using some kind of PC as a player/scaler is the best-value option.

Werner Heisenberg is stopped for speeding.POLICEMAN: "Sir, do you know how fast you were going?"HEISENBERG: "No, but I know exactly where I was."

Active Member

There is a program called DScaler for PCs that De-interlaces and upscales and image. Some people use a Digital TV card for Freeview and other use a capture card for external sources. Most capture cards will take an s-video feed while the Sweetspot card is the only one to take RGB.

You could use the PC as a HTPC (Home Theatre PC) and feed the NTL through a capture card then onto the TV as an upscaled image while using the DVD ROM in the PC as a DVD player again upscaling the image. Also, with the right software, you can record onto the hard drive.

Active Member

Not sure how you are getting the picture to your sharp to from the NTL box....I have a LC26GA3E and when I initially connected from my sky box to the screen I was unimpressed...I then bought a good quality scart cable and connected via input 1 on the screen....the big difference in PQ however only came when I went on to the sky set up screen and told it to output RGB to the screen...the difference was amazing.

In short....try looking at the NTL box and see if it is outputting RGB.